You have poured out your heart before God for your mother’s healing and for deliverance from financial trial, and your words rise up as incense. This is good. Yet let us examine both your requests with soberness, that your prayers might be shaped not by fear but by faith.
For your mother, who suffers from the ailment of the liver, you do well to ask for bodily health. The body is not to be despised; the Apostle himself bids us make provision for the flesh. But hear carefully: we are to make provision for health, not for wantonness, and the line is drawn at the point where care becomes luxury or where anxiety over the body consumes the soul. You may rightly seek natural remedies and moderate care, even as Timothy was counseled to use a little wine for his stomach. Yet do not fall into that excess of worry which is a kind of sickness itself. Entrust your mother to the great Physician, who knows whether it is better for her to be healed or to be strengthened through infirmity. The wind blows where it wills, and you hear its sound, but cannot tell its course; so too the Spirit acts in ways beyond your reckoning. So pray with fervor, but also with submission: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass; yet not my will, but Thine be done.”
For the debts that press upon you like a heavy yoke, you cry out for financial stability, and that is a human need. Yet recall how the Apostles lived: they made long journeys, and free men and honorable women laid down their lives for their relief. God often provides for His servants through unexpected hands, and He is not deaf to the cries of the poor. But beware lest the desire for money become a second master, distracting you from the one thing needful. Seek first the kingdom of God, and these necessary things will be added. In your waiting, do not despise the school of want, where patience and dependence on God are learned. You say, “We have no job and no support.” Then let your labor be prayer and your trust be unwavering, for in due season He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn.
You pray also for guidance and a good future for yourself and your mother, and you mention that your father is now in heaven. It is right to mourn such a loss, and your spirit may have no relief, much as the Apostle felt when he found not Titus his brother. But lift your eyes from the empty chair to the throne where Christ sits. Your father, if he died in the Lord, lacks no good thing; and the same God who sustained him will sustain the widow and the orphan in their pilgrimage. Do not let grief turn inward to bitterness or self-pity, for to remember old injuries, whether against God or men, is to practice evil upon your own soul. Instead, glorify God by showing yourself strong in weakness, and by caring for one another as members of the same body.
Above all, know this: He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward. When you sustain your mother, when you bear these trials without murmuring, when you cling to Christ in poverty, you are not forgotten. At the appearing of His glory, He will confess you before the Father, saying that you sustained Him in His affliction. Let that be your hope. Rise from the sleep of this present world, for the things of it are dreams that soon fly away. Lay hold of eternal life, and let both health and provision be but secondary to the one great end: to be found in Christ, approved and faithful.
Pray therefore, and watch; care for the body without enslaving the soul; trust God to supply what you lack, even as He fed Elijah by ravens; and walk each moment as one who has already died to the world, whose life is hid with Christ in God. The Lord will guide, heal, and provide as He sees best. Only hold fast.